The friendly but fatuous style of the Postmodern Clog – and it is curious that this same style extends also to a large part of the commentaries on the site – lends itself perfectly to the purposes of propaganda. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the Discoshaman is in fact an English language editor working for the “Orange” youth organization PORA. He himself announces this in a post dated 24 November that is reproduced on Free Republic. Indeed, the title of the original post as reproduced on Free Republic is “Updates from PORA — The Revolution WILL be blogged”. The references to PORA have, however, been removed from the archived version of the post on the Postmodern Clog – as has the cheerful admission “I am writing from HQ”.

To those bloggers who have in good faith adopted the Discoshaman as their authoritative source on the Orange “revolution”, I would suggest the following: you have been used.

It wouldn’t be the first time a political party uses the internet for that purpose.

Hindrocket (via Betsy) writes about Misinformation at The Times, specifically misinformation by Thomas Friedman, who gets it wrong in everything from Pell Grants to military spending:

So, while some of what Friedman says is true, much of it is simply misinformation. But let’s make a more fundamental point: Friedman’s key contention is that America’s priorities are out of whack because we are not spending enough money on education and foreign aid. This claim is absurd. Let’s look at education spending first. Check out the actual data from the Department of Education. The U.S. spends more per capita on secondary education than any country except Switzerland.

. . .

Are there problems with our education system? Sure, but they have nothing to do with “priorities” as Friedman means the term; i.e., budgetary priorities. Our problem stems from the fact that we put the welfare of administrators and teachers’ unions above that of students. But on this topic, Friedman has nothing to say, and his newspaper bitterly opposes the only practical solution on the table, school choice.

while a Powerline reader points out that federal “general science and basic research” budget has risen much faster during the Bush administration than it did during Bill Clinton’s first term.

As much as we celebrate the “birth” of the blogosphere this year, I think we should also be mindful of its infancy and the danger and challenges the future is going to present. How we meet those will determine if, or how quickly this medium becomes a powerful tool for real democracy, as opposed to just another avenue for a pedagogy that purports to instruct and inform but does little more than actually stall the potential growth of a broader democracy in our time. Either way, the greatest laurels for “blogs” most likely rest in their distant future. And that’s a genuinely exciting topic to me.

United Nations officials who track AIDS say Cuba has done a better job than most countries at corralling the disease. “Certainly there has been an increase in AIDS, but it is not big, not like you see in the Dominican Republic, or Haiti, or in Puerto Rico,” said Paloma Cuchi, who oversees the United Nations AIDS program in Latin America. “They have a very good medical infrastructure, and people have access to care and prevention.”

In the early 1990’s, Cuba quarantined people with the virus, and those discovered to be infected are still required to stay three to six months in one of Cuba’s 13 government AIDS sanitariums, where they receive treatment and counseling on how to survive with the virus and how to avoid passing it along. Once they leave the hospitals, the patients are closely monitored in their homes by social workers, officials say.

The Dominican Republic, Haiti, or Puerto Rico do not force their citizens into compulsory testing, or internment.

The UN official brings up Puerto Rico, which has horrible AIDS statistics (two of my friends have died of AIDS), so let’s look at Puerto Rico: Puerto Rico does have “a very good medical infrastructure, and people have access to care and prevention”, the factors the enthusiastic UN official praises in Cuba. Puertoricans who suffer from this terrible illness don’t get incarcerated for months, and afterwards aren’t “closely monitored in their homes by social workers” and the government. Instead, all Puertoricans can access the internet for information, something forbidden in Cuba. Additionally, Puerto Ricans, as befits American citizens from birth, are free to travel to the US mainland for treatment anywhere in the USA, and airfares are inexpensive; those with means are free to travel anywhere in the world to seek treatment, and many do since the economic conditions in Puerto Rico enable them to pursue any treatment they can afford.

Castro of course will blame AIDS on the “US embargo”, just as he blames everything else on it, ignoring the fact that there are some 100 other countries with which Cuba could trade. That is, when he’s not denying that prostitution exists in Cuba. But I digress.

The Cuban internment program has been famously controversial because of the compulsory testing, and the fact that AIDS patients are incarcerated because of their illness:

In the mid-1980s, when little was known about the virus, Cuba compulsorily tested thousands of its citizens for HIV. Those who tested positive were taken to Los Cocos. They were not allowed to leave.

The policy, perhaps only possible in a highly controlled communist society, was condemned by human rights groups across the world.

Then there is the issue of reporting: Castro’s regime closely controls all information on disease, since the mirage of a good health service is a great part of its propaganda. Believing the Cuban government’s statistics on anything is absurd. The question is, What are the real numbers of people with HIV or AIDS in Cuba?

As I posted before, Cuba has a long history of persecuting gays, a fact the NYT article carefully ignores. Reading this 1988 article, one realizes that in the “two-bedroom apartments, each of which housed two married couples”, not only there’s no gay couple in sight, the authorities replied “with a little bit of pride in Cuban machismo, that Cuban men could not be expected to control their sexual behavior”, the implication being that the sexual behavior would be exclusively heterosexual. Discussing AIDS as a human rights issue is impossible in Cuba. Even more clear is Richard Stern‘s article,

I wondered how long I, as an AIDS activist, would last in Cuba, if it were one of the target countries of the Treatment Access/Human Rights Program funded by the Association I direct. I also tried to imagine the demonstrations and “zaps” held by activist friends in the United States happening here, and could only picture a firing squad.

While the BBC and the NYT articles I link to above claim the Cuban program is a success, one sentence stands out,

Lydia says she is a prostitute because she needs the money to buy things like food and medicine.

In arguing for an animal-autism connection, Grandin sides with brain researchers who link many autistic symptoms to problems with the frontal lobes. In people with autism, she notes, these areas are either abnormal or they receive scrambled messages from other parts of the brain — or both. In contrast, the frontal lobes of animal brains are simply undeveloped; normal animals function somewhat like off-kilter, autistic humans.

Which isn’t so terrible, in Grandin’s view. Characteristically, she describes many autistic symptoms as strengths rather than weaknesses, particularly the tendency to see details in isolation rather than as parts of a unified whole. For her, ”hyper-specificity” — the act of focusing on the trees rather than the forest — is also the quality that connects what she calls ”animal geniuses” with autistic savants. Whooping cranes can memorize long migratory routes they’ve flown only once for the same reason some savants can make drawings with perfect perspective: both accomplishments rely on an extremely fine perception of details. Tellingly, Grandin sticks with neutral terms like ”hyper-specific” and ”particularize” to describe this trait. In contrast, autism experts generally call it ”weak central coherence.”

It’s been almost 40 years since the politicians started “solving” our property tax crisis. In 1966, they added a sales tax. In 1976, they added an income tax. They kept raising those taxes. Property taxes kept rising as well.

Why? Because there were no controls on spending.

Here in The Principality spending’s so over-the-top that by now routine maintenance items, such as street repaving/rebuilding, are being financed by issuing debt. Mulshine concludes,

. “The reality is that the primary sources of high property taxes are schools and municipal spending. Until we deal with that, who’s kidding who?”

The property tax task force is kidding us. That’s who.

In other Jersey news, The re-enactors were out, but the river was too dangerous to cross, so this year Washington didn’t cross the Delaware.

The Star Ledger’s Auditor names former Gov. James E. McGreevey as Loser of the Year.

Don’t feel guilty. Enjoy it to the fullest, because everything we have here, whether we realize it or not, is very, very expensive, and to fail to enjoy it would be a colossal waste and an insult to the people who paid the bill.

I’m not a Dickens fan, and agree with Trollope that Dickens milked popular sentiment to great financial gain. A Christmas Carol ranks high on Dickens’s exploitive list: loving poor innocent family cruelly bled dry by heartless rich guy, which makes for a teary story, so of course everybody from Alastair Sim to The Muppets have done a version. (The Muppets’ version is quite enjoyable because of the performances by Michael Caine and Ms Piggy.) As for the plot, I share Alan Behr’s opinion,

The film, based on the classic business training manual by Charles Dickens, presents a unique problem In the seven years since the death of business-partner Jacob Marley, Ebenezer Scrooge has struggled to keep his London concern competitive in an ever-changing market. Robert Cratchit, a disgruntled clerk, takes advantage of his company’s vulnerability during the make-or-break fourth-quarter selling season to demand an immediate increase in vacation time.

Marley’s Ghost then appears, advocating a reworked business model. The interjection of the supernatural is a clever device by which the filmmakers illustrate a shift in paradigms in the face of a labor action Ebenezer skillfully buys off the agitator with the gift of a turkey. That will assure Cratchit’s loyalty–or at least his attendance–through the close of the quarter, after which Ebenezer will be free to can him.

But will he? Surely not until a suitable replacement is found. (See the companion work on outplacement, Apocalypse Now.)

Needless to say, several years ago, when a friend called me saying “You must go see Patrick Stewart do A Christmas Carol on Broadway”, I was rather underwhelmed. I wasn’t all that impressed by him on film or TV. My friend went on: Her daughter was a big PS fan, and watched all the Star Trek: The Next Generation shows, so her daughter had dragged her to the show. The last thing I wanted to do was to pay Broadway prices for sitting in on a Trekkie/Trekker convention. My friend, who really really didn’t like Star Trek, finally convinced me, particularly since she knew I love solo shows, and I’m ever grateful that she did.

Patrick Stewart’s solo show was absolutely excellent. He dressed in (what looked to me like an Armani) perfectly tailored brown suit, wore soft shoes, used a few props on an otherwise bare stage, and narrated, no, lived, each character to perfection. His DVD version of ACC is nice and he did a good job, but the live solo performance has to be one of the best I’ve ever enjoyed. He had every person in the audience, old and young, hanging on to his every move and breadth. You actually saw each separate character, even when your brain told you he was alone on the stage. For the Fezziwig’s party particularly, he populated the stage with dancing people, all from your imagination.

Indeed, Stewart had me (and the rest of the audience), hallucinating. He used the hallucinatory skills later on, at a lecture he gave at The University a couple of years later, but that’s a story for another post.

Thank you, Mr. Stewart.

(PS, while the IMDB says PS is 5′ 10″, I’d say he’s more like 5’8” – but never fear, he’s very attractive, particularly when dressed in charcoal-grey Armani. As another friend said, “For a short, bald guy in his sixties, he’s hot!”)